Power Requirements and Cooling

As you can imagine, both versions of the Geforce 8800 require an active cooling solution. Almost a full length heatsink/fan exhaust system is present on the stock cooler which extracts the hot directly out of the back of the PC case. Surprisingly the cooler is really quiet, a lot more so than you would expect for a cooler of this size. Different manufacturers of course may decide to put on custom coolers on their brand of Geforce 8800. The Power requirements are somewhat confusing however. Nvidia claim that the Geforce 8800GTX uses only 5W more power than that of the Radeon X1950 XTX. Testing shows that this is not too far from the truth on average when under heavy loads. The confusing part is the The Geforce 8800 requires two PCI-e power connectors directly to the graphics card as well as the 75W of power that it will receive from the PCI-e slot. The Radeon uses only one power connector and the power from the slot. Does 5W extra need an extra power connector? Nvidia says to comply with PCI-express specifications it does. Without pointing the finger at ATI, what exactly are they trying to say about the Radeon 1950 XTX?